Press Release

Applause integrates crowd-sourced testing into Blueport’s agile development process, extending its ability to test and manage the customer experience across devices

Boston, Massachusetts -
May 11, 2017

Applause, the global leader in testing, feedback and research for digital experiences, today announced that it is working with Blueport Commerce, the leading cloud ecommerce platform for furniture, to ensure the quality of the platform is world-class across all devices and geographies.

Blueport Commerce is used by the largest retailers in North America to run their omnichannel websites, provide better shopping experiences for their customers and drive sales online and in their stores. The platform hosts over seven million monthly visitors who shop eight brands serving regional and national markets, using numerous mobile device types and multiple customer journeys. Blueport is faced with an incredible challenge to provide a seamless cloud-based shopping experience for all of its customers and Applause ensures that it does.

“The main challenge we faced before we began working with Applause was conducting the amount of manual testing required to provide a smooth omnichannel, cross-device e-commerce platform for our customers,” said Andy Wolf, chief product officer at Blueport Commerce. “Applause not only has a community of talented testing professionals who know how to find the right bugs, but it also provides us with more than 100 mobile device and operating system combinations through testers who mimic our actual users – something we simply couldn’t find anywhere else. It is amazing how seamlessly Applause has fit within our normal development lifecycle by acting as an extension of our team and understanding our business.”

For many furniture retailers, the move to omnichannel, digital experiences has been a struggle because of the nature of the merchandise they sell. Products tend to be a major purchase for most consumers, involving significant online research combined with physical visits to stores. It is critical that consumers have a consistent and enjoyable digital experience to augment their physical shopping experience. The physical – digital customer journey for furniture Blueport Commerce delivers those digital experiences on behalf of their furniture retailer customers, by providing a turnkey cloud-based ecommerce platform to help them engage consumers across any type of channel or device.

With an agile development process that involves updates every two weeks, Blueport has significant testing requirements to ensure that their customers can deliver a seamless digital experience to consumers. Applause’s community of testing experts is integrated into that development and release cycle to ensure that any bugs or experience flaws are identified and remedied before new experiences and services go live.

“Blueport helps furniture retailers across North America grow sales online and in stores by delivering an innovative digital platform,” said Mark Holland, VP, North America customer success, Applause. “With testers available when they need them and where they need them, we are able to help them quickly test their products in an extremely complex environment, across a variety of devices. The end result speaks for itself and has ultimately revamped how they test and release.”

About Blueport Commerce

Blueport Commerce is the leading e-commerce platform for furniture, used by the largest retailers in North America to run their omnichannel websites, provide better shopping experiences for their customers and drive sales online and in their stores.

Designed to overcome the challenges of selling furniture online, the Blueport SaaS Ecommerce Platform plugs into any furniture ERP system to quickly launch best-in-class sites fully integrated with stores. Built-in proprietary marketing and merchandising features power remarkable omnichannel shopping experiences that are efficient and easy for retailers to run.

Blueport’s Ecommerce Help offers Marketing, Merchandising, Content and Catalog services to ensure retailers have the capacity and expertise to maximize their omnichannel results.

About Applause

Applause is the worldwide leader in crowdtesting and digital quality. Software is at the heart of how all brands engage users, and digital experiences must work flawlessly everywhere. With 400,000+ testers available on-demand around the globe, Applause provides brands with a full suite of testing and feedback capabilities. This approach drastically improves testing coverage, eliminates the limitations of offshoring and traditional QA labs, and speeds time-to-market for websites, mobile apps, IoT, and in-store experiences.

Thousands of leading companies — including Ford, Fox, Google, and Dow Jones — rely on Applause as a best practice to deliver high-quality digital experiences that customers love. Learn more at www.applause.com.